Fosdem 2020 - Event report

FOSDEM, the biggest gathering of Open Source enthusiasts, developers and hackers in Europe, was on the last weekend of January like every year in Brussels. This marked the 20th edition of FOSDEM.

This edition of FOSDEM brought a lot of changes. The Fedora and the centOS booth was split, and the Fedora booth was moved from its “traditional spot” next to the entrance of building K, towards the middle surrounded by other booths.

Our team was more diverse than ever before! We had Marianna Balla coming from Albania, Geoffrey Marr from the United States, Sumantro Mukherjee from the Fedora QA team, that came from India along with one more contributor.

Our booth was full of goodies, like every year. We had plenty of stickers for all participants, along with pens, and pins. We had many different type of stickers this year, Fedora Loves python, Silverblue, Neuroscience, hexagon stickers, large Fedora logo stickers, you name it! Again like last year, we worked together with the centOS community to print durable coffee cups that carried both of the centOS and Fedora logos! These were quite a success, and people loved them. :)

I brought with me the new Fedora roll-up banner of the Greek community, and a thinkpad to showcase Fedora 31. The Fedorator is the next big cool must-have-in-a-fedora-booth thing. It’s a 3D printed box with a Raspberry PI, a touchscreen and two USB ports exposed on the front side of the device. The basic use case is the user inserting a flash drive. The screen then provides a menu where the user may select a Fedora release, including the Workstation or Spins and Labs. Upon selection a bootable image is written onto the flash drive. The schematics and the code are available online.

Overall I can say that all contributors did a great job. Both days we had the Fedora Project Leader, Matthew Miller present at the booth. We had a lot of people coming this year at the booth and we talked to many people. It was also fantastic that we had contributors from many different areas of expertise. One thing I noticed this year is that we didn’t get many technical questions, the conversation we had with users coming to us was mostly about the distribution and ways to get involved.

Last but not least, a big thank you to the organizing committee, for making FOSDEM once again a great conference. Hope to see you all next year!